Competitive analysis of online reviews using exploratory text mining

Purpose – This paper explores the usefulness of analyzing text-based online reviews using text mining tools and visual analytics for SWOT Analysis, as applied to the hotel industry. These results can be used to develop competitive actions. Design – The text mining/visualization tool, ReviewMap, was used to transform an archive of reviews spanning multiple suppliers into a hierarchy of data of increasing dimensionality. Visual summaries at each level were integrated to propagate selections at one level throughout the rest of the hierarchy. These visual summaries identify features required for competition at a given level and features that currently discriminate amongst competitors. Methodology – The approach was exploratory, the objective of which was to determine if useable competitive intelligence could be found in a typical collection of online reviews for a set of competing hotels. A publically available collection of reviews was subjected to a set of text mining procedures and visual analyses in order to summarize the features and opinions expressed. Originality – Prior analyses of online reviews relied solely upon numeric “star” ratings. This study utilized text mining to uncover information within the written comments and applied the information in a SWOT Analysis of three competing hotels. Findings – In the set of reviews used in this paper, a common measure of analytical power almost doubled when text mining summaries of the written comments were used in combination with numeric ratings. Visual analytics revealed the dominant features for each hotel, the features required of all hotels competing at a given level, and the features that define specific positions within the competitive landscape. This analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats revealed several promising competitive actions for the hotels in the study

EEVi – framework for evaluating the effectiveness of visualization in cyber-security

Cyber-security visualization is an up-and-coming area which aims to reduce security analysts’ workload by presenting information as visual analytics rather than a string of text and characters. But the adoption of the resultant visualizations has not increased. The literature indicates a research gap of a lack of guidelines and standardized evaluation techniques for effective visualization in cyber-security, as a reason for it. Therefore, this research addresses the research gap by developing a framework called EEVi for effective cyber-security visualizations for the performed task. The term ‘effective visualization’ can be defined as the features of visualization that are crucial to perform a certain task successfully. EEVi has been developed by analyzing qualitative data that leads to the formation of cognitive relationships (called links) between data that act as guidelines for effective cyber-security visualization in terms of the performed task. The methodology to develop this framework can be applied to other fields to understand cognitive relationships between data. Additionally, the analysis presents a glimpse into the usage of EEVi in cyber-security visualization

Exploranative Code Quality Documents

Good code quality is a prerequisite for efficiently developing maintainable software. In this paper, we present a novel approach to generate exploranative (explanatory and exploratory) data-driven documents that report code quality in an interactive, exploratory environment. We employ a template-based natural language generation method to create textual explanations about the code quality, dependent on data from software metrics. The interactive document is enriched by different kinds of visualization, including parallel coordinates plots and scatterplots for data exploration and graphics embedded into text. We devise an interaction model that allows users to explore code quality with consistent linking between text and visualizations; through integrated explanatory text, users are taught background knowledge about code quality aspects. Our approach to interactive documents was developed in a design study process that included software engineering and visual analytics experts. Although the solution is specific to the software engineering scenario, we discuss how the concept could generalize to multivariate data and report lessons learned in a broader scope.Comment: IEEE VIS VAST 201